The Wonder Years' tenth anniversary tour “No Closer To Heaven” Orlando
ORLANDO, Florida – The Wonder Years stopped by the House of Blues Orlando on their fifth day of tour with the legendary Knuckle Puck and the new, upcoming powerhouse of Equipment. This tour celebrates the 10th anniversary of the album No Closer to Heaven in full, along with some fan favorites and deep cuts that fans do not want to miss! The night included deep, important conversations on the importance of Narcan, the importance of politics in their music, and the significance of taking time for your mental health.
The lead singer of Wonder Years, Dan Campbell, affectionately known as "Soupy," shared how cool it is to see a band before they get huge, and that's no exception for the first act, the four-piece from Toledo, Ohio, Equipment. Soupy says, "If you got here early to see Equipment, you now have bragging rights," and he was right. Equipment started their set with high energy, bringing the grit of pop-punk to the forefront for the night. Equipment is already making waves in the pop punk scene by the number of people singing along to their hit song Tequila Redbull in the crowd.
Up next was a band that needed no introduction: Knuckle Puck. The set started with straight bangers: Want Me Around and No Good, which instantaneously started a circle pit and had people soaring through the air, screaming along with the words. Knuckle Puck has grown since their first album, Copacetic, in 2015, even remixing/remastering it mid-last year for streaming. The second-to-last song they played was off of their first record Untitiled and was the quiet before the storm of last crowd surfers hurried to get lifted before the end of Gone.
Finally, The Wonder Years took the stage to perform their full album, leaving it all out on stage. They started the set with Brothers, the first song on the album. Soupy came out and with just a single spotlight, started the emotional night singing, “We’re no saviors if we can’t save our brothers." When the other members of the band came onto the stage, they immediately jumped into Cardinals, a heavy and emotional song, which is a common theme of any Wonder Years song: it hits you with an emotional ambush. The set continued with I Don’t Like Who I Was Then, which is when an enormous pit opened in the middle, which continued to grow throughout the night. Near the end of the first half of the set, Soupy joked that if you came here tonight to hear love songs, you are not in the right place. He continues with a “public service announcement” that they are not a band that writes a lot of love songs, furthering, “Almost all of these next songs make that idea unpalatable, but this next song is about my wife; you have about 3 and a half minutes of a love song." And he continued with You in January when the crowd swayed, singing along to “You were the one thing I got right." Soupy exclaimed he’s going to play two more songs and then "walk the fuck back on stage and play a second set for you.”g to play two more songs and then "walk the fuck back on stage and play a second set for you”.
They started the second half of the night with Passing Through a Screen Door off of their 2013 album, The Greatest Generation, an iconic album that Soupy brings up that Rolling Stone got right, naming the album in the pop-punk greatest album list. Although the band played more deep cuts like Heaven's Gate and Dismantling Summer, they also played the song Oldest Daughter from their 2022 album, The Hum Goes on Forever, in which they asked the crowd to sing the bridge, "Madelyn," which the crowd practiced with Soupy before starting the track. They ended the night with their number 1 hit song off of the album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing: the album that features the stuffed eagle Hank which they were selling at the merch stand. The song "Came Out Swinging" started with the iconic line, “Moved all my shit into my parents basement” and the crowd started pushing, shoving and being lifted into the air while they all screamed the first song that got them into the pop punk legends of The Wonder Years.
